ALERT: Major Phishing Scam Revealed

On Monday it was reported that in a major security scam over 10,000 Hotmail accounts were compromised and all of the usernames and passwords of these accounts were posted online. Phishing scams involve e-mail messages — often warnings about a fake security breach of a bank account or login name — asking recipients to click on a link to take them to a Web site so they can enter their correct information. In this case hackers obtained the passwords by setting up fake websites identical to the actual webmail site.

At first it was thought that Hotmail was the oly victim of this latest scam. Sadly, this is not the case.Google  has  confirmed today that thousands of Gmai accounts were compromised by an “industry-wide phishing scheme.” According to the BBC, the login data of over 30,000 Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, and Earthlink accounts have been posted online.

Google fought back forcing password resets on all affected accounts and emphasized that this scam was  not a breach of security, but the result of some  users falling for phishing scams. Although the  lists of emails have been removed from the web, to be sure these lists were already downloaded by the scammers.

As a means of avoiding such scams we urge you to please change passwords frequently, check for any discrepancies with senders addresses or information, and never use the same password for multiple log-ins.